Real Simple magazine's May issue asked readers: What is your favorite first line of a novel?
Among them was a favorite of Andrew's and one that I admit illustrates Hunter S. Thompson's talent in 18 words.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
While I do not and never have condoned the drug culture, there is something very compelling about these 18 words, as if in so short a time, Thompson has shown himself to the world, not caring how anyone else feels about his lifestyle.
Here are some my favorite first lines from novels:
It is only at night that she has the strength to wander.----Lisa Carey, The Mermaids Singing
(The last paragraphs on page 340 of this novel are amazing as well.)
The widow Arden and her two daughters lived in a one-room cottage just outside the village of Mortlak, less than a mile from the Thames.--- Patricia C. Wrede, Snow White and Rose Red
Don't worry, David, I'm on my way.--- Spoken by Steve Earle and recorded in his biography Hardcore Troubadour: The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle by Lauren St John.
Although a good quote shouldn't need explanation, I believe the one above is the exception. Earle mutters these words to his lawyer or agent, who has brokered a multi-million dollar deal for Earle, despite the fact that Earle has fucked up his music career, upset everyone who's ever known him or helped him, and is in the midst of poverty, heading towards homelessness in South Nashville on account of his several-thousand dollar-a-day cocaine/ heroin habit.
David is waiting for Earle to make a contract negotiation meeting in New York City and Earle insists he's on his way, but he's nowhere near an airport. Instead, he's on the street about to get some blow or heroin or both, another attempt to slowly kill himself. All this, in two paragraphs of the biography go to illustrate just how a drug can ruin a man's life; how he can ruin his own with a drug.
Everybody lies---Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict
2 comments:
"none of the campers awoke after the first shots were fired." i read this in a men's magazine on a airplane. the story was about smuggling people out of china
"From a little after two oclock until alomst sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afterneeon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that - a dim hot airless room with the blinds closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashed full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them." ---William Faulkner, "Absalom, Absalom!"
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